IN MY FIELD OF VISION EVERYTHING BECOMES AS CROOKED AS SNOW

Last night, I dreamt. I would like to have so many
dreams that my dreams begin to replace

my memories. In the dream
there was a hospital for dogs. The dogs were many

and merry and when I saw them
I felt a loneliness so unbearable

I fainted. And then I woke up. I’ve fainted before,
in real life. This morning, the trees burst into red

like an abstraction. The abstraction being violence
and the violence being that it’s autumn

and I want somebody to hold within night’s curtain – the way
the sky holds clouds in the shape of a dog’s sweet tongue.

Today, walking, an owner pulled his dog away from me.
Once a dog bit my hand until my hand bled like a nose

and once my nose bled for so many hours. I had
to be taken to the emergency room. I waited for more hours until,

suddenly, it stopped. Now, I stand in a kitchen, holding a knife
to cut a slice of cake. I’m afraid of wounds. On a date I tell the man

I’m with that I am most afraid of papercuts. His shock proves
to me that he is not my soulmate. Later, I am walking through rain,

it is night all over again. I pass a line of similar looking men,
all wearing suits, waiting to step into an audition. I am

with my mother. We are discussing how it would be miserable
to be the person judging each audition. She seems absent.

I am old enough to know not to tell her that I am hurt.
I am obsessed with the house finch. This is not my worst trait.

The house finches burst from the red trees like batteries.

TIME, MORE OF IT

The night-pained highway is the best ghost.
It’s truth that you want. Here’s a bit:

the streetlamps are turned on.
January has come like fresh water.

In my fickle brain: folk, always.
My vision far clearer.

Lights speck a bank of water like dust.
Lights peck the water like the beaks of seagulls.

The seagulls have always belonged to the beach.
The whales, the seaweed –

the small bits of clam shell.
A lighthouse in the distance. A bit like your face.

Your nose is in everything, like a dog’s paws.
The truth is – what? You’re in everything.

FARM SCAPE

The nostalgia was nostalgia all along.
It layered over the facts like dirt.
There was no logic. There were many
falsehoods. There were chickens in the yard.
The cows with their great black spots,
releasing milk. I could have used a farm.

With horses. And tangled, wild trees.
For a while, I didn’t have any ideas.

I walked and I walked
underneath a sycamore, by a pond.

I knew that the farm was not mine.
The farm belonged to a friend
who I loved, but the farm
was not mine. The pond
was not mine, either. The pale, wrinkled pond.
The chickens laying their pale, speckled eggs.
I needed most to be in love.
The friend I could not fall in love with. The friend lived

in a small cabin on the farm. The cabin was brown
like eyeballs. On Sundays, he traveled long,
so long, to farmers’ markets. I knew – I just knew
I would never be a part of his large and dotted world.

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Loisa Fenichell’s work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets, and has been featured or is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Washington Square Review, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, all these urban fields, was published by nothing to say press and her collection, Wandering in all directions of this earth, which was a Tupelo Press Berkshire Prize finalist in 2021 and 2022, was the winner of the 2022 Ghost Peach Press Prize, selected by Yale Younger Poets Prize winner Eduardo C. Corral, and published by Ghost Peach Press. She is the winner of the 2021 Bat City Review Editors’ Prize, has been a finalist for Narrative Magazine’s 2021 30 Below contest, a runner-up for Tupelo Quarterly’s Tupelo Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the Dorianne Laux / Joe Millar prize. She has received support from Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop and Community of Writers and holds an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University.